by Greg Iles
Airspeed was eighty-five knots, still too fast. He would have given a lot for a cold winter day, good dense air for the propellers to bite into and to keep his stall speed low. This was the worst weather for what he was about to do. Cheryl leaned forward, watching the concrete rise toward them and endlessly repeating Hail Marys. Apparently, if she was going to die, she wanted to see it coming. A perverse instinct, perhaps, but a human one.
“Can you do it?” she asked softly.
A brief crosswind tried to push the tail around, but Will corrected for it. “We’re about to find out.”
She pointed through the windshield. “There they are!”
He shut everything out of his mind but the scene ahead. In the right lane: the white Rambler, moving slowly, seeming to pull an endless chain of cars along behind it, cars which were actually trying to whip into the left lane so that they could pass the cars holding them back. In the left lane: the fast movers, cars and trucks racing up and passing the sideshow in the right lane at eighty miles per hour. In front of the Rambler, where he needed to set down, were the speeding cars in the left lane and a couple of dawdlers in the right. A Mercury Sable about sixty yards ahead of the Rambler, and a minivan some distance ahead of that. An intricate ballet of mechanical dancers that would remain in their present relationships for a very brief time.
It was now or never.
He centered the Baron on the broken white line and dropped toward the roof of the Rambler at eighty-two knots. He couldn’t see what was happening behind him, but he felt sure that the sight of a twin-engine plane dropping toward the road with its gear and flaps down and a wingspan as wide as the interstate had sent a lot of feet to a lot of brake pedals.
The Baron overtook the Rambler with a speed differential of thirty miles per hour. Will flew half the distance to the Mercury Sable, then eased the yoke forward and and reduced power further. The Baron seemed to stutter in midair, as though he had applied the brakes to a car.
Then it fell like a stone.
Three miles behind the Baron, Hickey gaped and pointed through the windshield of the stolen Camry.
“Look at that crazy son of a bitch! If he’s got to crash, the least he could do is get off the highway to do it.”
Karen said nothing. The instant the Baron had dropped out of the sky and lined itself up over the interstate, her heart had jumped into her throat. It had to be Will. It had to be.
“What’s he doing up there?” Hickey wondered aloud. “He’s a kamikaze, this guy. He must have lost an engine.”
He looked to Karen for a response, but she sat still and silent, staring at the dashboard. If Will was risking his life to land on the interstate, that could only mean one thing. Abby was somewhere up ahead. And she was alive.
“What’s with you?” Hickey said. “You gotta see this. This’ll make CNN tonight.” He punched her on the shoulder. “You sick or something? Why are you . . .”
He faced forward again and watched the plane drop to the level of the cars ahead, then disappear.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch!”He floored the accelerator and started to pass the Cadillac ahead of them.
Karen grabbed the wheel and wrenched it toward her, throwing the Camry into the right lane and driving the Cadillac off the road in a cloud of dust.
“Let go!” Hickey yelled, hammering her head with his fist.
Karen clung to the wheel like a sea captain in a gale. The Camry veered onto the shoulder, which dropped precipitously to the woods below. She didn’t care if they flipped three times and crashed into the trees, so long as it kept Hickey from reaching Abby. She had made that decision hours ago.
“Let go, you crazy bitch!”
He slammed an elbow into her ear and yanked the car back onto the road. Karen blacked out for a moment. She knew she had, because when she came to, her hands had slipped from the wheel, and the Camry’s engine was whining as Hickey streaked past the cars ahead. She saw then that he was steering with only his left hand. His right held Will’s .38, and it was pointed at her stomach.
“Do it again and I’ll kill you,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.
She backed against the passenger door.
As the speedometer needle went to ninety, then a hundred, Karen studied the gun in Hickey’s hand. It was somehow more frightening than the idea of a wreck. A wreck at this speed would certainly kill them both, but the gun might kill only her. And Abby was so close—
Hickey cursed and applied the brake. A long chain of flashing red lights had appeared ahead. Brake lights. Something was happening up there. And that something had to be Will’s plane. Hickey swerved across the left lane onto the median shoulder and raced past the braking cars. The hatred in his face was like a sulfurous fire burning beneath his skin.
Fixing an image of Abby in her mind, Karen began to pray. The image she saw was not Abby as she was now, but as an infant, the miracle of flesh and bone and smiling eyes that Karen had given up her career for, that she would give up everything for. A profound sadness seeped outward from her heart, but with it came a peace that transcended her fear. In the silence of her mind, words from Ecclesiastes came to her, heard long ago but never quite forgotten. There is a time to kill, and a time to die. She closed her eyes.
“I love you, Abby,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Will.”
“What?” Hickey said, fighting to keep the Camry moving past the bumper-to-bumper cars.
Karen curled her fingers into claws and launched herself across the console with murder in her heart.
Hickey fired.
The Baron hit the concrete hard, and Will’s plan instantly began to disintegrate. The driver of the Sable must have slowed, because the Baron was racing toward it far too fast to stop. Will hit the throttles and hopped over the car like a student pilot practicing a touch-and-go landing. When the wheels hit again, he saw that the minivan which had been comfortably ahead of the Sable had also braked, probably because the vehicles ahead of it had slowed or stopped to watch the crisis unfolding behind them.
He pulled up his flaps, cut power, and applied the brakes, but he saw in an instant that he wouldn’t be able to stop in time. He no longer had enough power or distance to skip over the minivan, as he had the Rambler, and his props were spinning with enough force to chop the van into scrap metal. Yet the driver wouldn’t get off the damned road to avoid the crash. Like Will, he was blocked by the wooded hill of the median on the left and the steep drop into woods on the right. But either would be preferable to being hit by an airplane. Then Will saw the group of heads in the back of the van.
Kids.
He swerved left and shut off his mixture, fuel, and master electrical switch. He felt a moment of euphoria as they passed the van, but it turned to horror as his right wingtip clipped the vehicle and they began to spin.
Time decelerated with sickening slowness. Cheryl was shrieking, and at some point in the whirling chaos Will saw a log truck barreling up from behind them. Sitting in front of the log truck like a Matchbox toy was the white Rambler. The Baron’s nose gear crumpled as the plane spun, and one of the props hit the cement in a storm of sparks, sending a blade hurtling off into space. As they came around to face the Rambler again, Will saw the little car suddenly scoot forward out of the log truck’s path, but his relief died as it went over the narrow shoulder and plummeted down the slope toward the trees.
“We’ve got to get out!” he shouted, gripping Cheryl’s arm.
The plane had come to rest facing north, and the thirty-ton juggernaut of steel and wood that was the log truck was speeding toward them with the sound of burning brakes. Will unbuckled both seat belts, then leaned over Cheryl and unlatched the door.
“Get out!” he shouted.
But she didn’t. She was trying to look back into the cabin. Will scrambled over her and onto the wing, then pulled her from the cockpit. She was yelling something at him, but he shoved her onto the ground and jumped off after her.
“The money!” she screamed. “We left the money!”
“Forget it!” He grabbed her arm and tried to pull her clear, but she jerked free and jumped back onto the wing.
Will ran for the edge of the road.
As the Rambler hurtled down the grassy slope toward the trees, Huey pumped the brake, but it seemed to have no effect. Abby was screaming in his ear, and he saw the screams like red paint on the air. His mind went blank for a second, but then a thought flashed like a Roman candle. He grabbed Abby with both hands and tossed her into the backseat like a sack of flour.
The Rambler tore through an old fence and crashed into a wall of saplings, hurling Huey’s three-hundred-pound body forward and smashing his head against the windshield. Abby smacked into the back of the front seat and bounced backward.
She couldn’t seem to get her breath, but other than that, she felt okay. She got to her knees and looked over the front seat.
The windshield was smashed to pieces. Huey was bleeding from his forehead, and he wasn’t moving.
“Huey?” she said. “Beast?”
Suddenly he moaned and held his ribs. Abby climbed over the seat and took hold of his right hand. “Wake up, Beast.” She shook the hand again, then pinched it. “Can you talk? Daddy didn’t mean to hurt you!”
A loud boom sounded behind her, followed by a whoomph that made the air around the car glow for several seconds. Terror for her father went through her like a knife.
“Beast! Wake up!”
His right eye blinked, and he groaned in pain. “Run,” he whispered.
“You’re hurt.”
“Run, Jo Ellen,” he said in a raspy voice. “I smell gas. And there’s a bad man coming. Run to Daddy.”
Jo Ellen . . . ? And then she remembered. Huey’s little sister was named Jo Ellen. Abby looked down at the floor. Belle and the carved bear and child lay in a mosaic of shattered glass. She picked up Belle and put her in Huey’s lap, then grabbed the bear and climbed out of the passenger door. She wished she could pull Huey out, but trying to pull Huey would be like trying to pull a mountain. She turned away from the car and looked up the steep hill.
A chill of fear made her shiver.
A tall man was looking down at her out of the sun. She couldn’t see his face, only his silhouette. Then the shape of the man stirred something in her.
“Daddy?” she said hesitantly.
The shadow began running down the hill.
Cheryl crawled off the shoulder and onto the grass of the median. Her knees were cut to pieces. Her hair stank of gasoline, her eyelashes were gone, and her left forearm had a big red blister on it.
But she had the money.
Behind her lay what was left of the plane, a burning mass of twisted metal in the wake of a log truck that had only managed to stop a few seconds ago. A mile-long line of cars had stacked up behind the wrecked plane, and dozens of people were coming forward, gawkers and rubbernecks in the lead.
Cheryl coughed up black smoke, and the spasm hurt like a wire brush raked over the inside of her rib cage. She thought she might have breathed fire during the explosion. What the hell. It was a small price to pay.
She flattened her hands on the grass and got to her feet, then picked up the blackened briefcase and started up into the trees.
Karen lay against the passenger door of the Camry, staring at the small hole in her upper abdomen. Hickey was gone. He’d shot her and left her for dead. She couldn’t tell how badly she was wounded. Abdominal wounds were tricky. They could kill you in five minutes or put you through weeks of hell. In any case, the gunshot had been enough to knock her against the door and keep her off Hickey while he raced after Will’s plane.
Through the windshield she saw cars in front of her and cars behind. But no plane. She’d heard an explosion a few moments before, one she hoped was a car wreck and not Will’s Baron. But it could have been Will. Landing on a busy interstate was Evel Knievel stuff. And if something had happened to Will, Abby might be alone up there with Hickey and the others.
Karen opened the Camry’s glove box, found a wad of Kleenex, and stuffed it into the bullet hole. Then, steeling herself against the pain, she forced herself to turn and pop open the Camry’s door.
Falling half onto the road, she decided to let her legs follow. After they did, she rolled onto her stomach and lay there, annoyed by the numbness of her midsection. Getting up seemed a theoretical impossibility, like surpassing the speed of light. Then the smell of burning aviation fuel reached her, and she changed her mind.
Will angled down the hill toward Abby, pumping his legs like an extreme skier in a barely controlled fall. Abby took several steps up the shoulder, her eyes bright.
“I knew you’d come, Daddy!”
He snatched her up and hugged her as tight as he dared.
“Where’s Mom?” she asked. “Is Mom with you?”
He had no answer. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s find her.”
“Wait. Huey’s hurt.”
“What?”
“He’s stuck in the car. He’s bleeding!”
Will didn’t especially want to help Abby’s kidnapper, but he moved close enough to the Rambler to see that the man was badly hurt. The tang of gasoline was in the air. If the car caught fire, he’d be burned alive.
“Help him, Daddy!”
Will set Abby down and ran to the driver ’s door. It had not been jammed shut in the crash, but Huey was most definitely jammed behind the wheel. He weighed over three hundred pounds, and Will could scarcely budge him.
“Huey!” he yelled. “Help me! Move!”
The man’s left forearm was like a ham. Will grabbed it with both hands and pulled with all his strength. With a groan like an annoyed bull, Huey twisted in the seat and heaved himself out onto the ground. There was just enough slope for Will to roll him down and away from the car. That was all he could do.
“Let’s go find Mom!” Abby called.
He had told Abby they would do that, but he really wasn’t sure what to do. The smart thing would probably be to duck into the woods and wait for the police to show up. But what if Hickey had been in that silver Camry? And what if Karen was still with him after all? She might be bound and gagged in the backseat, or lying wounded in the trunk. He wished he had Cheryl’s pistol, but there was no point in wishing. The gun had exploded with the plane.
He scooped Abby into his arms and looked up the shoulder. A dozen people stood along the crest, looking down at him. There were probably hundreds of cars backed up already. A world-class traffic snarl. If Hickey was up there with them, so be it. Somebody up there would have a gun. This was Mississippi, after all. They might all have guns. He hitched Abby up on his hip and started up the shoulder.
Cheryl sat down in the trees on the ridge that divided the northbound and southbound lanes and tried to catch her breath. The scene below was like something out of a Spielberg movie. It was like watching a parade from the roof of a building. Cheryl had done that once as a child. With her real father. But this parade had gone terribly wrong.
The doctor ’s plane was still burning, throwing up a column of black smoke like a refinery fire. The driver of the log truck was stumbling back toward the fire, to see the damage his truck had done, she supposed. Cars were lined up behind the plane as far as she could see, and hundreds of people were beginning to get out of them. By the plane, though, there were still only a few, as if the spectators sensed that the show might not be quite over. At least the little girl was okay. Cheryl had seen the doctor carry her up onto the road.
She needed to get moving, if she wanted to stay out of jail. Her best bet was probably to go down to the northbound lanes and hitch a ride with some horny salesman. She probably looked rough after the crash, but the truth was, men didn’t care. Not when you were twenty-six and had a body tailor-made for the Victoria’s Secret catalog.
Cheryl was standing up when when she saw Joey rise from behind a parked car and walk toward the knot of people that had gathe
red around Dr. Jennings and his little girl.
Will was stunned by the reaction of the people on the shoulder. They all talked at once, and he could only catch fragments of their conversations. A couple of guys slapped him on the back, but another yelled, “Where’s the stupid son of a bitch who was flying that plane? Somebody needs to arrest his ass!”
Will just held Abby tight and asked someone—anyone—to call the state police and the FBI. Three men detached themselves from the crowd and trotted back toward the line of cars, presumably to use their cell phones.
“Daddy, your plane,” said Abby, pointing at the mangled wreck.
Will heard himself laugh. “That old girl did what I needed her to do. That’s all that matters.”
“Look at my bear, Daddy. Huey made it.”
Abby held out an intricately carved figure of a bear holding a little girl. Will was no art expert, but he was an experienced collector, and there was something in the little figure that moved him deeply.
“EVERYBODY BACK!” screamed a male voice.
Will thought it was a cop until the men around him began to scatter, half of them sliding down the shoulder behind him, the other half running back to their cars. Among the running bodies, his eyes picked out a man standing still as a pole, thirty feet away. He had dark hair and black eyes, and one of his pant legs was soaked with blood from groin to ankle. As Will watched, he raised his arm. A revolver gleamed blue-black in the sun.
Hickey.
There was nowhere to run. He and Abby were caught between the burning plane and the steep shoulder. If he made a dash down the hill with Abby in his arms, Hickey could simply take a few steps and shoot them as they tried to reach the trees.
